Your Hand, Wall or Notepad as Touchscreen

[Still Waters]

The upcoming movie In Time features digital clocks embedded in the skin; but imagine that instead of showing your life ticking, the image was part of your phone's interface. Need to make a call? Just dial it up on the palm of your hand.

Chris Harrison, a PhD student at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, and a fellow at Microsoft Research, came up with a wearable device that projects an image onto a surface, which then doubles as a touch screen.

Called Omnitouch, the system uses a shoulder-mounted device that both a camera and projector. The camera images your fingers and builds a three-dimensional map of them. Then the software builds a kind of skeletal diagram that shows where the fingertip is. To detect a "click" the camera looks for areas of the finger that are in contact with a surface. (The only time it doesn't work is if the area the finger is in is outside the camera's view).

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[booNyzarC]

That's pretty cool. It'd be even cooler if the projector/camera was also a shoulder cannon like in Predator.